Yukon Gold Standard

There are the up-and-coming root vegetables with near-celebrity status — celeriac, parsnips, beets — and then there is the potato. Simultaneously beloved and despised, the potato is our most-grown and most-eaten vegetable and the one that is sometimes seen as a leading villain in the obesity pandemic.

O.K., but chips and fries are not the only ways to eat potatoes. A good potato can be incredibly delicious sautéed in a little garlicky olive oil, simmered in stock, boiled and drizzled with the tiniest amount of butter and a sprinkle of mint or mashed with greens. No one is going to convince me that these preparations are going to make us fat.

And those are just the start. In the something like 10,000 years since the potato was cultivated (it has been in the hands of Europeans and their descendants for only 500), there have been something like 10,000 different ways of cooking it. Here are a mere 12, but at least a few of them are bound to be new to you. All of these recipes are based on about two pounds of potatoes, roughly four medium to large spuds.

There was a time when the term “all purpose,” when applied to potatoes, was really wishful thinking: no potato combined waxy and mealy properties in a pleasing balance, at least not one grown in North America. The Yukon Gold changed all that. Developed in Ontario in the ’60s (but only on the market since the ’80s), it is similar to potatoes grown in Northern Europe: it’s starchy enough to bake and firm enough to boil, making it as close to the everything potato as exists.

To be specific, mashed dishes are best with russetlike varieties, and new potatoes are better for cooking in fat. (Use this type for the labor-intensive tater tots, which are little short of a revelation.)

You can peel the potatoes in these recipes or not; thin-skinned potatoes, especially, are just fine with a good scrubbing (use a brush). And remember the salt and pepper.